HDD Dead? Or Windows just won't install

My laptop yesterday froze and so I left it for a while, and when I returned, it had booted to a silver screen (Starup repair, just without the menu). I fear the Hdd may have failed. I plugged it into my other laptop via a USB to SATA cable and no data showed up, you need to format this disk, parameters are invalid etc. After hours I finally formatted it into one single partition with EaseUS (NTFS) and it created a system reserved partition of 90mb. I have put it back into the original laptop (They're both Aspire 5733's) and tried to re-install windows. First time round I tried Win8.1, although it installed an booted to a black screen. I eventually gave in trying to fix that and tried to install Windows 8.1 enterprise (from work). That wouldn't get anywhere past "Setup is Starting". I gave in (again) and tried Windows 7 (which no, didn't get past "Setup is Starting". I put the hard drive in my laptop and installed Windows 7. It got up to "Completing installation", where it told me the disk image was corrupt. I checked the MD5 and it appeared fine. I just want to give up now (yet again) And help???